Why Recluses Are the New Superstars

If Tiger Woods pulled a J.D. Salinger and Conan kept waiting in the wings, would you still be interested? If we've learned anything recently about the power of mystique over the propaganda of Twitter, we might just say you'd be obsessed.

When J.D. Salinger died last week at ninety-one, obituary writers and the punditocracy remembered him for two things: an influential (if not quite prolific) body of work, and a steadfast refusal to publicize himself. In particular, residents of Cornish, New Hampshire to which Salinger retreated from New York City more than half a century ago cited their implicit agreement with Salinger to shield him and his property from nosy journalists and looky-loos. Their discretion their "code of the hills" thrived for decades as a proud, profound collusion against the enduring encroachment of unwilling celebrity.

But Cornish's protection of its most famous citizen had an even more profound effect on our culture that the locals might be loath to acknowledge: In his canny, hard-fought battle for privacy, Salinger established a model for superstardom that flies in the face of everything we know about celebrity in the twenty-first century. He was so successful at silence a perfect specimen of anonymity, notoriety, and discipline that he accomplished a quiet revolution in mythmaking that today's fame-seekers would do well to emulate.

After all, in an era that makes phenomena out of fame-grabs from Jersey Shore to American Idol to The Bachelor, the real money is in mystique the gold standard of any cultural economy, and among the most salable commodities known to man. And nobody sits on a bigger stockpile of mystique than a recluse. Think authors Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, think actors Greta Garbo and Owen Wilson, think filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick the erstwhile and the contemporary, off on their own with their tight-fisted control of various legacies and creative mandates. Not to mention motivations: Right now there is arguably no more private public citizen on Earth than Tiger Woods, who finally has a reason to enact the taste for reclusion he hinted at in these very pages six years ago. And if he does if he shuns not only the post-tournament press conferences but the whole arcane concept of a "comeback" more people than ever will be waiting to see the latest public statement on TigerWoods.com. The brand without the branding, like Conan without The Tonight Show, could be a model for the post-Twitter celebrity.

Meanwhile, found among the little public comment Pynchon has ever made, the novelist once observed, "My belief is that 'recluse' is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters.'" Of course Pynchon protests too much. Forget about reporters: Reclusion makes the novelist all the more appealing an enigma to book fans, who do still exist and do regard such platitudes as a challenge to respect his privacy even as they imagine someday, somehow burrowing into his confidence. (As one of Salinger's obits rightly noted, to be a successful recluse, people have to want to see you in the first place.) That's powerful stuff enough so that the makers of The Simpsons corralled Pynchon's voice (if not his likeness) on two occasions. The writer also last fall narrated a "trailer" for his most recent novel Inherent Vice, stimulating a legitimate wave of viral literary interest. Who knew such a thing was even possible?

The lesson here was and is, and, I think, will continue to be in profile management. Regardless of whether Pynchon and his sequestered ilk embrace the term "recluse," they've invested in their brands by making them scarce. In doing so, their notoriety appreciates it's as though they're famous with interest. Take for example Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson, who this week gave what is believed to be his first interview since 1989. The occasion (at least in part): his beloved comic strip, which he halted at its peak fifteen years ago, will be honored with a U.S. postage stamp later this year. And then there's the filmmaking Wachowski siblings, one half of whom (Larry) now lives as a woman (Lana), and neither of whom has uttered an audible peep since well before beginning their blockbuster Matrix trilogy over a decade ago. Yet both recently, bafflingly appeared in photos tweeted by Arianna Huffington from the set of their latest film. Speculation and conjecture exploded.

Coming off the '00s, when the Web and reality TV made our emotional lives more dependent than ever upon recognition, this type of painstaking elusiveness is the vanguard of self-promotion. As fame has attenuated over YouTube, Facebook, cable networks, and all the damn celebrity blogs, you don't have to be J.D. Salinger to want to withdraw; the sheer volume of modern social media ultimately serves to reinforce our own anonymity anyway. After all, it wasn't just the prospects for self-exposure that led Andy Warhol to prophesize, forty-two years ago, that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes; it was his awareness that without enough mystique to balance out one's ubiquity, any longer would simply be unsustainable. When the ubiquity overtakes the mystique à la the overexposed twerps from Jersey Shore the very spirit of fame exhausts itself.

So what could fame built upon more than fame itself look like, exactly? Consider the recluse spectrum: the late Salinger and John Hughes completely hidden from public view on one end, and supremely modulated celebrities like Cormac McCarthy or David Letterman on the other their public windows open just enough to do their jobs before retreating once more to the shadows of private citizenry. What's in between? Imagine the possibilities: Conan O'Brien or Simon Cowell walking away from TV entirely after their network paydays, or George Clooney holding fast to his recent promise to curtail his media availability to one or two interviews per film. Imagine the myths that ensue, the intrigue accrued over three, five, ten, twenty-five years. Where would Team Coco be without its mascot? It's not a rhetorical question I sincerely want to know.

And not because I dislike O'Brien, either, but because in the end, I don't understand why anyone who could choose to live as some variety of recluse wouldn't do so. It seems such a perfect, elegant expression of control: to occlude the flow of bullshit in one's life; to accrue and manage fame on one's own terms; to engage with people you trust and appreciate without the burden of interference; to develop your own "code of the hills" well beyond your passing. Look no further than Letterman's first monologue after Salinger's death, when the late-night host cheerfully declared himself "now the world's most famous living recluse." He was only half-joking, and we were only half-laughing. Still, the understanding was mutual: America can't say no to the privilege of a superstar hiding in plain sight.

S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded.

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